Setting the Record Straight: Missouri BVR
Dylan Bryant, newly appointed Chief of the Bureau of Vital Records at MissouriDepartment of Health and Senior Services (DHSS), knew he had his work cut out for him. The bureau had significant responsibility and impacted the lives of every citizen at multiple times over their lives: issuing not only birth and death records, but adoptee records, information for passports, validating information for drivers’ licenses, processing out-of-country death information, recording divorces and a wide variety of other life points of Missouri citizens. The vital records system had 60,000 users and issued nearly 1,000,000 records per year. It was antiquated, not automated and many of the records were still in paper form.
BVR was the source of the vast majority of citizen complaints for the Department, many of which also went through the Governor’s Office. It was a pain point for the entirety of state government and, no wonder, as their average response time was 44 weeks at the time he assumed the leadership role.
The backlog was significant and had nearly doubled in the past two years. The backlog was so significant that the staff assigned to work on filling the requests for records spent the majority of their day on the phone responding to complaints and explaining why they could not assist in the immediate. The status quo simply was not working.
On his ride home one evening, Dylan asked himself what could be done within the existing resources of ˜38 FTEs to make progress on this backlog. Dylan arrived at an idea, discussed it with the four supervisors over the call center and then invited each of the staff members in for a brief, personal discussion explaining that he valued each staff person’s opinion and the idea would not work if everyone was not fully bought in. He proposed that for one full month, the four supervisors step away from their other duties and man the call center allowing their staff to fully concentrate on responding to the requests for records in the queue. It was a trade-off and a risk because their call center response time was measured and reported to the legislature annually, they knew their call center response time would increase with only four supervisors manning 8,000 calls/month. But all believed it was worth that risk if they could decrease the average time to process a request for records and would eventually provide much better customer service all around, even eventually decreasing the load on the call center because citizen complaints would decrease.
During the 30-day period, the average response time went from 44 weeks to nearly half that. Dylan celebrated with the staff and asked the question “can we do it for another 30 days?” and the staff resoundingly agreed. Within that second 30-day period, the average time to process a record request decreased to ˜8 weeks – having started at 44 weeks just 60 short days before!
The average response time for a record through BVR is now 1-2 weeks and has been maintained for about three years.
The Missouri BVR story is a striking example of the practice of Challenge the Process, one of the five practices of an exemplary leader according to Kouzes & Posner in their seminal book “The Leadership Challenge”.